Barry van Veen has a quick post on his site showing the Composer users out there how they can use a package from a local directory without having to go through the hassle of pushing it and adding it to Packagist.

Suppose you run a website and want to split part of it into a package with its own repository. You start a new repository and check it out on your development machine. But now you want to see how the website and your new package integrate. How to go about this?

This article explains how you can require a package from a local path into your project with Composer. This way you can run a local copy of a repository and test any changes you make. Because the local repo will be symlinked changes are shared in real-time, there is no need for intermediate committing and updating.

He shows how to update your composer.json configuration's repositories section to add an entry with a "type" value of "path". This then points to the location on the filesystem where the package resides. Then it's just a matter of requiring the dev-develop branch and the code will be treated just like any other package. He also includes a section showing how to handle things when symlinking fails, a problem that usually happens on Windows for VM users. Usually it's related to a permissions error for whatever user is running the VM.